Concluding the sell-out Ralph Fiennes season at Theatre Royal Bath which opened in June, featuring three productions directed by or starring the acclaimed actor, who can say what inspired him to select the four-part Small Hotel by Rebecca Lenkiewicz to follow the well-received new David Hare play Grace Pervades about the actress Ellen Terry and a lauded revival of Shakespeare’s As You Like It starring Harried Walter.
I don’t think I was alone in being startled when Fiennes, who plays Larry, a TV interviewer whose career is nose diving, began tap dancing and clutching a blood-stained shirt, something which only began to make sense during the final scenes. He even delights fans by stripping off his shirt, but we’re already too distracted by trying to fathom what’s going on.
Initially assuming that Larry is dead and the ‘Small Hotel’ is the check-in desk to the next life, with a dreamlike sequence of memories, the next moment one wonders if the unfolding scenes are simply a flashback to events leading up to his injury. Perhaps it would all hang together more if he’d received a knock on the head rather than an abdominal wound. And then Rachel Tucker comes on as the receptionist, wearing a black suit and eye patch and adding to the perplexity of our calculations by her questioning of the dazed Larry. She sings and tap dances brilliantly too, though she appears to channel the Grim Reaper more than Fred Astaire.
You can’t fault the choreography, Fiennes’ footwork or his magnetic ability to transfix us as Lenkiewicz teases the audience with clues as to Larry’s past, but there’s a sense of immature contrivance in the use of song, dance, projection and Bob Crowley’s rotating stage that makes it feel akin to a high school tribute to successfully innovative productions like the National Theatre’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. While Larry is busy unpicking his life, a theatre critic is often placed in the impossible position of trying to unpick where a weak play begins and inadequate direction takes over, but I’m not sure that one can lay any blame at Holly Race Roughan’s feet, for this is a slick production – you’re just none the wiser after seeing it.
Running for 1 hour 30 with no interval, this certainly helps to create an intense experience, with each scene revealing a little more about Larry’s confused, depressed state of mind, partly due to a career that’s going down the toilet and his complicated relationships with his mother, former flame and twin brother, Richard. We only ‘meet’ the reclusive, bearded Richard (also played by Fiennes) via a pre-recorded film projection intended to be a live video call between the pair. Although Fiennes is fully convincing when interacting with a computer screen, given that Ben is by far the stronger of the two male roles, it’s disappointing not to see Fiennes act the part on stage until the finale.
Larry’s former relationship with the now A-list Hollywood actress, Marianne, is what compounds his abject sense of failure as a brother, son, lover and talk show host. Now living the high life in LA, Marianne is understandably taken aback when Larry, desperate for a ratings boost, calls her after twenty years in order to book her to come on his show. Rosalind Eleazar is superb as the woman trying to make sense of her failed relationship with Larry, begun when she was just a teenager and which, revealed by Marianne in the bizarre live TV interview, puts paid to Larry’s career and I expect ‘cancel culture’ will still be going strong should this play be revived in twenty or thirty years.
Impressing as the only character with what you could call a personality, Francesca Annis shines as Larry’s alcoholic, dance fanatic mother, Athena, whom we first see wearing a sequin ballgown and gliding towards Larry on the revolving stage in a sequence reminiscent of Betty Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. We later find her wallowing in the self-perpetuating misery of spending her old age sitting on the sofa drinking, smoking and watching old black and white dance films to transport her to her lost youth. Having shrugged off glamorous roles, at least temporarily, Annis delivers a wonderfully grotesque portrayal of a narcissistic mother whose hold over her adult child is so hypnotic that we too wince with the wounds she continues to inflict, not least when she repeatedly refers to Larry as Richard.
It’s not the first time that Annis and Fiennes, two titans of the British stage, have acted together as mother and son: beginning their former off-stage relationship during a 1995 Broadway production of Hamlet, for which Fiennes scooped a Tony for his performance as the title character. I’m not sure whether it’s testament to Annis and Fiennes’ talent, but there’s no whiff of chemistry thirty years on, but then, it’s hard to find much between Fiennes and Eleazar either, despite an admirable attempt to convince us otherwise.
Intriguing yes, entertaining yes, but while this production deserves to be a sell-out due to the quality of the acting – and no doubt will be thanks to fans of Fiennes and Annis – you’re likely to leave feeling decidedly unrewarded by the play, which not only offers us themes of resentment and regret, but is a missed opportunity in itself. If Small Hotel was accommodation you’d booked through Airbandb you’d either still be searching for the key that was supposed to have been left under the plant pot, or wondering when you were going to find the view you saw in the photographs.
Small Hotel at Theatre Royal Bath from 3 – 18 October 2025. For more information and tickets please visit the website. Production images by Marc Brenner.
